Oscar Nuñez and I are sitting in the outdoor area of a coffee shop in Larchmont Village, when a parking enforcement officer asks if a car whose meter has expired might belong to us. When the oblivious owner of the vehicle comes out, Nuñez is the one to deliver the tragic news.
“She was crestfallen, but she recovered quickly,” Nuñez narrates dramatically as she drives away. And as our chat ensues, I wonder if the young woman realized that the man who informed her of the infraction appeared for nine seasons on the U.S. edition of “The Office,” one of the most successful and beloved sitcoms of all time, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.
The Daytime Emmy-winning actor, now 66, has since returned to the world of “The Office” — sort of. His character on the original show, Oscar Martinez — a no-nonsense, gay Latino man on Dunder Mifflin’s accounting team — is back in front of the camera crew that followed him and his co-workers for nearly a decade in Scranton, Pa.
In “The Paper,” a new comedy from “The Office” creator Greg Daniels (and now streaming on Peacock), Martinez has moved to Toledo, Ohio, to work as an accountant for the Toledo Truth Teller: a local newspaper in decline. But when Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) takes the reins as editor in chief to revitalize the dying publication, Oscar gets the chance to flex his cultured background and becomes an arts and leisure reporter.
“I think the character is fun because you could do a lot with him. He can be snotty. He’s kind of funny. And he could be serious,” says Nuñez about his fictional counterpart.
Via email, Daniels explains that since Oscar Martinez gets involved in local politics in the finale of “The Office,” interested in making a positive impact on his community, it made sense that the character still had room for new adventures. And that new chapter could exist without reopening any storyline that the writers had intentionally closed.
“Oscar Martinez as a character had a lot of dignity and never really needed to ‘learn’ anything, so he was one of the few ‘Office’ characters that didn’t change significantly by the end of the show,” says Daniels.
Nuñez and Daniels reteamed for the 2016 sci-fi comedy show “People of Earth,” where the actor played a priest. “We are friends, and I consider [Oscar] a comedy powerhouse that you can count on in any situation to be funny in a believable way, so I was excited to make him the bridge between the two shows,” adds Daniels.
These qualities become evident to me when a server named Joe comes to take Nuñez’s order. The actor uses this moment to both acknowledge the service worker and mine it for humor. “Carlos, put Joe in the article!” says Nuñez, who is a regular at this establishment.
“All right, that’s enough time for you,” he playfully tells the young man. “Get out of here. This is about me! There goes Joe.”
When Daniels first asked if Nuñez would be willing to reprise his role as Oscar Martinez in a new series, he agreed without hesitation. Nuñez, undoubtedly, thinks of this role as a gift that provides never-ending satisfaction.
“The best thing about Oscar Martinez is [that] I go home, I forget about ‘The Office,’ and I’m just living. But we do these conventions once in a while and there are kids, teenagers and young people in their twenties who are like, ‘Hey, man, I’m gay, and your character helped me come out of the closet.’”
The significance is not lost on Nuñez, who happens to be a married heterosexual man and father to a teenage daughter. “It’s very emotional,” he says.
By the time he got cast in “The Office” in 2005, Nuñez had been living in Los Angeles for about a decade and trying to break through as an actor. “I was told, and it turned out to be true, that from the moment you get to L.A., it takes about 10 years to crack the nut,” he says. “Some people do it earlier than others. For me, it was just at the 10-year mark.”
Chelsea Frei as Mare, from left, Ramona Young as Nicole, Melvin Gregg as Detrick, Gbemisola Ikumelo as Adelola, Alex Edelman as Adam, Eric Rahill as Travis, Oscar Nuñez as Oscar in “The Paper.”
(John P. Fleenor for Peacock)
Nuñez arrived in the U.S. at the age of 3 from Cuba with his dentist mother and lawyer father. The family settled in New Jersey. He remembers his late parents as people who loved art, in particular theater, opera and ballet.
After high school, Nuñez attended Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology with the intention to become a fashion designer, but he dropped out after one semester. His mother encouraged him to study to become a dental technologist.
Nuñez followed the suggestion, but after just a few months he quit — and decided to formally pursue his lifelong passion for acting and comedy, in part inspired by his love of “The Carol Burnett Show” as a child.
He took a drama course and joined an improv troupe called Shock of the Funny in the lower East Village. Once in L.A., he joined the Groundlings, a famed improv and sketch comedy school, while working odd jobs to stay afloat. Nuñez never gave himself a time frame to “make it,” but knew that his career would only advance if he didn’t let the relaxed allure of L.A. distract him from his goal.
“Los Angeles is a town where it’s very easy to just go to the beach, hang out with friends, but you’re not really concentrating on your career because everything’s kind of cool,” he says. “You’re cruising by.”
Nuñez remembers when he auditioned for “The Office” as “a good actor’s day,” and believes that his time at the Groundlings doing improv gave him a leg up that day. “I had four auditions that day, which made it easier because I didn’t care by the time I went for that audition,” he says. “And that’s a good way to go into an audition, not wanting it too much because you won’t get it if you really want it for some reason. It just doesn’t happen.”
When asked back to shoot the pilot, several of the actors in the supporting cast, Nuñez included, were asked if their characters could keep their real first names. It was when they shot the second episode, “Diversity Day,” that Nuñez felt the show could be a game changer.
“When I got ‘The Office’ I was acting, but I was still babysitting, I was also a teacher’s aide, and I was waiting tables,” he recalls. “And then during the course of the first season, I quit my job and was acting a hundred percent all the time, which is a great feeling.”
After rewatching “The Office” a few years ago, Nuñez concluded that only a couple episodes are “mediocre,” which speaks of the show’s overall quality and enduring power. “Just put it on whenever you are, any hotel, anywhere you are, put on any episode in any order and it’s funny,” he says.
He says his favorite episode that he appears in is “Gay Witch Hunt,” which centers Oscar Martinez, while he praises “Dinner Party” from the ones he did not take part in.
“The TV show we did was not a s—y show that people forgot,” he says. “It is a show like ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ or ‘Cheers,’ or ‘Taxi.’”
To play a Latino on a long-running hit TV show fills Nuñez with pride — yet he sees himself as an actor before anything else.
“Before [I’m] Cuban, before [I’m] Latino, I’m a comedic actor, so send me out for comedic roles,” he says. “I don’t care what the character’s supposed to be, just let me audition for it. If I suck, I suck, fine. But see me, and if I don’t get it, I’ll make it hard for you to say no. And you’ll keep me in mind for other things.”
When we get on the topic of being Latino in Hollywood, and in a country that hasn’t always been kind to minorities, he shares his ambivalence — and contextualizes matters of representation in the TV and film industry within a broader struggle in the United States.
“America is a racist country. You can get pulled over and be shot by a cop. It also happens to be a place where you can come from another country at 3 years old and end up with property and a family and a career,” he explains. “Both things are true. That’s the schizophrenia of this country.”
Nuñez, who says he’s voted in every election since he was 18 years old, feels overwhelmed by the swift political upheaval happening under President Trump — but he sees parallels to his family’s past in Cuba.
“A documented pathological liar who is afraid of the media and wants to [throw] critics in jail, who is anti-gay, anti-science, anti-intellectual … every time there’s a problem, he’s [the] victim. I’m talking, of course, about Fidel Castro,” he says. “That’s why my parents left [Cuba]. And now to be here and be going through this, it’s crazy.”
While his most famous character, Oscar Martinez, now works as a journalist in the Toledo Truth Teller, Nuñez feels called to be a truth teller in real life — especially concerning the treatment of immigrants in the U.S. And though he knows raising his voice may not gain him any favors in the industry, he believes it’s inevitable to get political during this time.
“There are detention centers where we’re not allowed to go see what’s happening to the people in there. That’s crazy. And everyone keeps talking about something else while that’s still going on,” he says, referring to Latinos in the industry who’ve remained silent.
“George Lopez speaks up, but there are many huge stars with millions and millions of followers who are Mexican or Latino who are quiet,” Nuñez says. “If you’re quiet, you’re not helping your people. You’re helping MAGA and you’re helping ICE. And that pisses me off.”
Before wrapping what’s admittedly been an emotional roller-coaster of an interview, Nuñez acknowledges how touchy it is to speak so candidly amid such a polarized political climate. “It gets political no matter what… we’re immigrants,” he says, with a nod to me being an immigrant from Mexico.
And soon, he’s off to pick up his daughter. At the end of the day, it seems Nuñez is just another concerned parent and Angeleno, holding onto hope that things might someday change for the better.
“The world is in flux. I have a daughter and I hope she figures out a way to navigate it,” Nuñez says. “I’m sure she will.”
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